Rainmaker Animation Deploys Qube! Render Farm Management Software

(November 06, 2007)

DMN Newswire--2007-11-6--PipelineFX, makers of Qube! software, the leading render farm management software for film production, game development, and digital media education around the world, today announced that Vancouver-based Rainmaker Animation has integrated Qube! to handle the rendering demands for their busy production schedule.

Rainmaker Animation currently has three direct to DVD productions, and a new feature film, Escape From Planet Earth, in the studio. ?With the company expanding, we have many overlapping high volume productions, said Martin Kumor, Head of Production Technology at Rainmaker Animation. ?Our render farm is an essential part of our production, and is integrated into two production pipelines, running XSI®, Maya®, Mental Ray®, Shake®, and many custom jobs. When we decided to upgrade our render manager, we needed a robust and reliable product to handle our production needs. We spent a considerable amount of time looking at different alternatives, and Qube! has been by far the best render manager we have seen. The advanced architecture combined with Python support, and easy-to-use customizable interface make it a fantastic product, said Kumor.

?We had a good number of custom render farm tools for our XSI shows, so naturally we were concerned about the time required to convert them to Qube!, said Kumor. ?However, the support team at PipelineFX did a great job of helping us complete the process. We switched the entire facility in the middle of an ongoing production, and converted our tools in a remarkably short time.

The Qube! render farm at Rainmaker Animation is doing a lot more than simply rendering frames. An important part of Rainmakers workflow was incorporating the farm into every aspect of their production. Artists need to concentrate on creative tasks instead of waiting on their computer to finish calculating, so any repetitive or computationally expensive task is processed on the render wall. ?Qube! allowed us to easily build our custom jobs to do exactly what we wanted, and significantly boost productivity, said Kumor.

Kumor adds ?Our next generation pipeline relies on the render farm to run very complex jobs with intricate dependencies and highly customized schedules. Having worked with many other render managers, I know that doing this properly can often be a difficult and an extremely time consuming task to implement. Qube!'s sophisticated architecture, support for callbacks, and easily customizable scheduler made implementing advanced features a simple process.

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About Rainmaker Entertainment Inc: Rainmaker Entertainment Inc., headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, is an award-winning visual effects, 3D animation and post-production company with a 28-year history of technical excellence and outstanding service in feature films, television, games and commercials. From its origins in the pioneering west coast post-house Gastown Productions, Rainmaker has grown into one of North Americas preeminent post-production service providers. Rainmaker, the largest animation and visual effects company in Canada, has three divisions Rainmaker Animation, Rainmaker Visual Effects and Rainmaker Post. Rainmaker also operates a facility in London Rainmaker Animation and Visual Effects UK Ltd. (Rainmaker UK), which offers cutting edge visual effects and 3D animation in that market. Rainmaker Animation, with the inclusion of recently acquired Mainframe Entertainment, creates 3D animation for the feature film market and is the industry leader in CG animation for television and direct-to-DVD family entertainment. Rainmaker Visual Effects creates state-of-the-art CG effects for the high-end feature film, television, commercial and game markets. Rainmaker Post provides a wide array of post-production services ranging from traditional film lab processes to the very latest in digital image processing, including HD. Rainmaker also maintains an office in Los Angeles, California. For more information, visit www.rainmaker.com.

About Qube! and PipelineFX: Qube! is the leading enterprise-class render farm management system for film production, visual effects, game development and digital media education. Qube! is highly customizable, extensively scalable, can be integrated into any production workflow, and is backed by world-class technical support. Qube! has custom pipelines for creative applications like Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk Maya®, NUKE, SOFTIMAGE®|XSI®, Shake®, Adobe® AfterEffects®, Pixars RenderMan®, Eyeon® Digital Fusion and many more. Qube! is IBM ServerProven®, database driven and operates in Linux®, Windows® and Mac OS®X environments. PipelineFX, with headquarters in Honolulu, Hawaii, and offices in San Francisco, CA and Vancouver, B.C. was founded in 2002. Qube! is used by world-class film and game studios and post houses including South Park Studios, Electronic Arts, Vanguard Animation, Rainmaker Animation, Disney Interactive Studios, Starz Entertainment, Reel FX, and Attitude Studio. Qube! is used by schools around the world including the School of Visual Arts in N.Y., Goebelins School in Paris, Carleton School of Architecture, Full Sail in Florida, the University of Advancing Technology, Pratt Institute, and the University of Hawaii-Academy for Creative Media. For more information, please contact Richard Lewis, VP of Sales of PipelineFX: richard@pipelinefx.com, Phone: 866-856-7823, 1000 Bishop Street, Suite 606, Honolulu, Hawaii, 96813, USA. Also visit www.pipelinefx.com.